What is Romanticism?

What is Kantian Ethics?

Surrealism in Literature & Film: An Introduction

What is Weird Fiction?

What is Monster Theory?

What is Phenomenology?

What is Magical Realism?

Key Elements of Gothic Literature & Film

What is Speculative Fiction?

What is Avant-Garde?

What is Bakhtin's Carnivalesque?

What is Existentialism?

What is Ontology?

What is Absurdism?

What is Cosmic Horror?

What is Aesthetics?

What is The Sublime? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

The sublime is a term used across a multitude of philosophical categories. Whether it refers to aesthetics, spirituality, morals, or metaphysics, the sublime is primarily used to describe a sense of incalculable greatness. It refers to an experience which makes us feel small, that reminds us of our own insignificance, and which compromises our rational frames of reference. Often originally associated with a transcendent, divine, or mythological encounter – a colossal storm, for example, a great landform, or a monumental cathedral – the sublime offers an experience that overwhelms our logical faculties. Philip Shaw describes such an experience in his book, where he writes,

The Sublime

Sublimity, then, refers to the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is defeated. Yet, through this very defeat, the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language. (2017)

So, the sublime is an experience that overwhelms the senses and subverts the mental frameworks we rely on to shape our understanding of the world.

The sublime has a long intellectual history. It is thought to have emerged in either the first or third century with a text by Longinus, a manuscript that Shaw describes as ‘a work of rhetorical instruction, intended to be used by politicians and lawyers seeking to inform, persuade or influence an audience’ (2017). The type of rhetoric that Longinus considers is ‘lofty’ and ‘grand’, corresponding to the Latin translation of ‘sublime’ (2017). It sought to ‘overwhelm the audience so that a weighty conception may be instilled in the mind without any bothersome appeal to reason or justice’ (2017). This may sound like a potentially manipulative linguistic approach, but what is significant is the way that the sublime was theorized, even then, to challenge our senses and evoke strong emotion; an encounter where our logical faculties succumb to the power of something beyond their comprehension.  

Since then, the sublime has become associated with many prominent philosophers: Burke, Kant, Derrida, and Nietzsche, among many others. One of the prevailing philosophical challenges posed by the sublime is the particular ways in which it is vulnerable to scepticism, such as the task of empiricist explanation. How can the existence of a subjective and ineffable experience like the sublime be verified? How can this experience that transcends the reach of rational thought and language be explained? There are various means of approaching these questions, but a good place to start is by supposing that what this experience of the sublime presents us with is a different means of aesthetic judgement of the world. It describes an experience that is not pleasure and not pain, not happiness nor grief, not beautiful nor ugly, but has been thought to exist in an entirely different mode of consciousness.

In 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published. Although the concept of the sublime preceded Burke’s publication, this was an important development in the sublime as an empiricist concept. Burke examined the effects of the aesthetic experience of the sublime on our bodies and minds. He defined the sublime as a response to nature and art that brought forth ‘the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling’ (1958, 39). It was Burke’s assertion that this degree of emotion eclipsed sensations of aesthetic beauty and pleasure and more closely approximated sensations of ‘terror’ and ‘danger’ (1958).

"I am satisfied", Burke wrote, "the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure." (1958)

Given this definition, the sublime might seem like an experience to avoid, but Burke emphasizes the complicated relationship and the close proximity between pain and pleasure, grief and joy. With this in mind, Burke proposed the sublime as not only an important human experience, but one with the potential to be quite wonderful. ‘Things which are terrible are always great’, Burke supposed (1958). In the experience of the sublime, we are faced with terror, danger – a colossal fear of the unknown and incomprehensible – which we ultimately derive pleasure from. This experience can come in a variety of forms that assault our different senses. Morose colours, loud noises, and sour stenches can all be experiences of the sublime, asserted Burke. ‘Soft’ and ‘cheerful’ colours, for example, would be ‘unfit to produce grand images’ whereas strong, dark colours might create this sense of greatness (1958). These colours alone could not account for the sublime, but they were likely to contribute such an experience. Of this, Burke wrote,

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

An immense mountain covered with a shining green turf, is nothing in this respect, to one dark and gloomy ; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue ; and the night more sublime and solemn than day. (1958)

Burke exemplified the way these elements that confront our different senses might come together to create a sublime experience through a storm. The overwhelming activity of a storm – the huge, darkened sky, the whipping wind, the sudden crashes of thunder and lightning – serves to remind us of our own vulnerability, our own physical, mental, and circumstantial smallness. In the experience of a storm, our own lives are put into perspective. This is a crucial experience and something which the sublime uniquely offers.

Burke famously emphasized the difference between beauty and sublimity, asserting that no experience could be both beautiful and sublime. In The Sublime Reader, this distinction is explained:

The Sublime Reader

Beauty is grounded in the passion of love and society, consists in a calming relaxation of our “nerves,” and is a response caused by an object’s (or person’s) qualities of being small, smooth, polished, light, delicate… Sublimity, by contrast, is rooted in the fear of death and desire for self-preservation and consists in tension in our nerves. It is caused by qualities such as an object’s vastness, infinity, and power. (2018)

This was significant because it challenged the aesthetic standards of classicism that prioritized precision, harmony, order, and restraint. Romanticism, a movement that succeeded classicism, ushered in an era of sentimental freedom, subjectivity, and expression.  Where a sense of the beautiful is ‘produced’ by ‘our reasonings’, the sublime ‘anticipates’, and ultimately, defeats it (2018). Classicism, then, corresponds to Burke’s concept of beauty – that which is aesthetically pleasing due to its balanced, smooth, orderly and delicate appearance – romanticism corresponds to the sublime; that which is powerful, unrestrained, dark and emotional.  Burke’s sublime became a founding concept for the early Romantics, influencing the trajectory of western culture in its wake.  

Because of Burke’s focus on the physiological and psychological effects of the sublime,

Kant considered his study as ‘an empirical psychology’ (2013).  As an idealist, however, Kant was not particularly interested in the empiricist verification of the sublime object. It was Kant’s general position that reality and the outside world could not be separated from the perceiving subject; that it is the mind that shapes experience rather than the other way around. Using this epistemological concept, Kant was able to discern the universality of the sublime.

In order to do this, Kant, like Burke, considered the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Neither beauty nor the sublime, for Kant were features of the outside world. When we look at a beautiful flower, or experience a thunderstorm, the sensations we feel are not intrinsic physical properties of the flower or storm. Instead, beauty and the sublime correspond more to ‘conditions of perception than to qualities inherent in the sensuous world’ (2017). Both can be said to belong to a similar realm; they exist as modes of consciousness rather than features of the outside world.

In The Critique of Judgement Part 1: The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790), Kant describes the difference between the two: 

The Critique of Judgement Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of an object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality. (1790 [2020])

Beauty is an aesthetic judgement garnered from the form of an object. When we look at a flower, we can coherently apprehend its form which our mind then organizes as beautiful. Where the sublime differs from the beautiful is that the sublime is the experience of a formless object. Like the storm or a great mountain, the very scale or infiniteness of the object might prevent us from recognizing its form, so it ceases to be understood as beauty. Beauty employs the mind’s power of sensory comprehension, of understanding, while sublimity overthrows those powers. For Kant, the sublime is that which our senses fail to apprehend, creating that overwhelming or threatening feeling of fear. This results in two very different sensations:

"The beautiful", according to Kant, "is directly attended with a feeling of furtherance of life, and thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination. On the other hand, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure that only arises indirectly, being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful…" (1790 [2020])

In apprehending beauty, our imagination has room to play and explore while the sublime confronts the limits of our imagination.

For Kant, the sublime fit within his crucial theory of the mind’s intrinsic ability to generate concepts. While the formlessness of a storm, a sea, a night sky, might confront the limits of our sensuous perceptions, the categories of our mind are able to conceptualize the sublime, even when our senses fail to. This ability functions independent of our experience, hence how we are able to organize the experience of something like the sublime that overwhelms our sense perception.

Romanticism is a cultural movement with strong affinity to the sublime. Based largely on the work of Burke and Kant, among others, romanticism in part hoped to free artistic expression from the oppressive standards of classicism. That which we associate as ‘beautiful’, which gives us pleasure, is often assigned to a reductive classicist world view. Romanticism, however, offers an experience beyond pleasure of the beautiful. To this end, the sublime provided a profound opportunity to access a raw and unstructured emotional experience. Hence, regular ruminations and examples of the sublime can be identified in romanticist works, both theoretic and artistic. Notably, the sublime has been a framework through which to study and interpret romanticism.

In romanticism, it is typically scenes of nature that exemplify the sublime. Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818) by Casper David Friedrich is a painting that has become representative of the romantic movement. It depicts a person in the foreground with their back turned to the viewer as they look out from a high precipice over a landscape enshrouded in clouds. Jagged rocks cut through the thick fog and in the background the great mountain range continues as far as the eye can see. Due to its subject matter of contemplation, subjectivity, and the natural world, Wanderer has not only become a symbol for romanticism, but it is widely accepted to evoke the sublime. The figure in Wanderer seems to be confronted with the vast power of nature. There is something potentially threatening and frightening about this encounter; the great drop of the mountain edge, the huge jagged cliffs, the unknown landscape in a veil of fog. The subject’s smallness in the face of this incomprehensible and infinite vastness creates a sense of danger, however, the subject seems to be inviting – welcoming even –  this experience. This confrontation of mortality, of vulnerability and insignificance, must offer something other than despair and fear.

Some facets of romanticism saw the natural world as the interface between the subject and God, so the sublime was an act of divine communication for which the natural world was the vessel. Hence, the vastness and power of the landscape in Wanderer could be that which Ferguson suggests, in Solitude and the Sublime, ‘affirms God’s omnipotence’ (2013). Or, the painting could depict ‘the experience of sublime pleasure in nature’ without necessitating a divine presence (2013). Whether the sublime is experienced as a moment of spiritual intervention or a stirring of deep visceral emotion, one relief that the sublime might offer is transcendence from the trappings of temporal, every-day life. A more in-depth analysis of Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog can be found here:

Wherever scenes of nature dwarf, threaten and thrill a perceiving subject in romantic works, there are suggestions of the sublime. In romanticist poetry, literature, music and visual art, the sublime stands for the purpose of freedom of expression, unrestrained emotion, and liberation from conventions of beauty. Romanticism offers an example of the way that millennia-old philosophical ideas can be implemented to change the perspective and aesthetic purpose of art.

The contemporary moment and the technological sublime

Shaw suggests that The Sublime often describes an experience that may not have much contemporary relevance. He writes that, 

such instinctive feeling for the transcendental is rare these days. As a result of secularism, together with increasing global awareness and media sophistication, we seem less inclined to regard the breakdown of reason and expression as indicators of a higher or spiritual realm. (2017)

If the sublime is taken to be an experience that infers spiritualism, or an awe and wonder in the new experiences the world affords us, it is likely not as widely accepted or universally experienced as it perhaps once was. A prevailing scepticism as well as the wide dissemination of digital images might prevent us from giving the sublime much credence. This all might result in a desensitization towards the original stimulators of the sublime experience. However, theories of the sublime continue to develop alongside these advancements. 

Leo Marx, for example, theorized what he dubbed the ‘technological sublime’, where we may come into contact with this transcendent power through the introduction of new technologies (1964). This is a feature of science fiction that uses new technological concepts – time machines, tractor beams, or intergalactic space travel, for example – to invoke a sense of the sublime. The same can be true, however, of our own reality. When rail or air travel was first introduced, it certainly would have been awe-inspiring in its power, challenging the reach of our comprehension of time and space (see our study guide on Time-Space Compression for more information on this topic). As humans, we quickly become accustomed to technologies that are part of daily life, but ever changing fields of industry, transportation, medicine and science may continue to confront the stretches of imagination and challenge our understanding of the world.

Technology constantly offers us new and often overwhelming experiences that then become integrated into the temporality of our lives. Art, on the other hand, may be said to have a timeless transcendental power that can repeatedly immerse the audience and evoke the sublime. Marx supposes that a feature of the technological sublime is the way in which it intrudes into nature. Perhaps, though, while the technological sublime is contingent on developments in contemporary culture and keeps pace with our rapidly adjusting judgements, arts that evoke the sublime can keep the wonder of nature alive in an ever-advancing technological age.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1st ed. Columbia University Press, 1958.

Clewis, Robert. The Sublime Reader. 1st ed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2013.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. 1st ed.  1790.

Marx, Leo. “The machine in the garden.” New England Quarterly, 1956.

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. 2nd ed. Taylor and Francis, 2017.

What is the Sublime?

What is Rationalism?

What is Materialism?

What is Empiricism?

What is Idealism?

What is Solipsism?

What is Free Verse?

Utopia vs. Dystopia - What’s the Difference?

What is Modernist Literature?

What is Classicism?

What is Neoclassicism?

What is Romanticism? | Definition, Examples & Analysis

When we say “romantic,” we usually mean gestures of love or intimacy, and the act of “romanticizing” refers to an idealistic, rose-tinted lens through which to see reality. Romanticism, however, denotes a period of Western history where a specific ideology was developed, an ideology that has shaped many of our concepts today. Rather than merely being a historical event or artistic movement, Romanticism has come to refer to a whole system of thought.

In a general sense, Romanticism was a cultural movement which flourished in the Western world from the end of the eighteenth century right up to the mid-nineteenth century. A response to the intellectual, political, and industrial changes of the modern period, Romanticism emphasized and defended individualism, freedom, nature, emotion, and expression. These concepts are a consistent thread throughout Romantic works. Fundamentally, Romanticism eschewed order, rationality, rules, and precision in favor of unbounded human feeling.

Although Romanticism is reflected in eighteenth and nineteenth century visual arts — in theater and architecture, music, politics and philosophy — it is most significantly embodied in its literature. Romanticists like William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855), Victor Hugo (1802–1885), Lord Byron (1788–1824), William Blake (1757–1827), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) are all found in the literary canon. Romantic poetry particularly epitomized the Romanticist ideology, and it remains some of the most revered poetry in literary history.

In Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge describes his Romantic poetic project, asserting,

Biographia Literaria

A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth. (1817, [2018])

This illustrates the priorities of Romanticism: feeling and emotion over rationalism and intellectualism. Romanticism rejected the prevailing ideology of the Enlightenment, which championed reason, materialism, and the classical traditions of more “enlightened” societies like ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, Romanticism sought artistic examples in the “uncouth” Gothic aesthetic of medievalism in order to restore belief and expression.

Despite what Coleridge suggests in the above quote, it is not that Romanticism was uninterested in truth, but rather that it rejected the authority of scientific truth or the Enlightenment belief that logic and reason were its sole arbiters. Logic and reason, for the Romanticist, could not account for the richness of life; truth was not merely a cold, hard, objective fact, or deducible by the intellect. Romanticism was more compelled by the instances in which these faculties were overpowered, where passion and feeling triumphed over intellect. This led to the belief that truth was an aesthetic feature. The Romanticists felt that the appreciation of beauty should be the ultimate human pursuit, and that it should frame our experience and understanding of the world rather than exist separately from knowledge and rationality. As Keats famously asserts in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819),

Selected Poems and Letters

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Romanticism established a different way of looking at and comprehending a modern world that had removed human expression and feeling from notions of productivity and knowledge. Romanticists sought to imbue the modern world with the virtues they thought were being lost: beauty, subjectivity, love of nature, and spirituality. Rather than being a historical event, Romanticism was a carefully developed set of ideas; a lens through which to look at an increasingly mechanized world.

Because Romanticism encompasses a wide range of cultural, intellectual, and political activities — the British Romantic poets, the French revolutionaries, the German philosophers and biologists, and more — this study guide will focus on the broad themes and historical circumstances that connect them all.

Romanticism was a response to the huge cultural and intellectual shifts taking place in the early modern period. It is seen as being both a part of, and opposed to, the ideas of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a historical moment that saw the restructuring of society and the employment of rational intellect in the name of freedom. As Duncan Wu explains in Romanticism,

Romanticism

The process by which people were awakened to a sense of self-determination was global. It began with the American Revolution and continued with that in France. And the impact of those upheavals cannot be overstated. (2012)

These uprisings reverberated around the world. Political and religious authority was being questioned in favor of publicly corroborated ideas, secularism, and societal progress. This progress was mirrored by the Industrial Revolution, characterized by the arrival of urbanization, consumerism, and mechanization. Travel became faster and more accessible, towns became cities, and factory workers were employed by the thousands. In the Western world, this created a certain kind of modern society made distinctive by mechanism, rationality, and globalization.

Romanticism was a push against this progress. Broadly speaking, it shied away from this vision of society, instead reveling in solitude, subjectivity, and emotional expression. Rather than embracing the advances of modernity, Romanticism venerated a rural life, with close proximity to the natural world. In this way, Romanticism represented an outlet — a sort of counterculture — for those who felt unrepresented and unembraced by the modern world. 

Because Romanticism did not take place in one locale, and nor was it intentionally formed by an appointed group, it is best understood through the key themes and ideas that unite it in all its facets and iterations. In the following section, we will explore some examples of these central themes. 

According to Romanticism, the natural world is a touchstone of beauty, truth, and imagination. In poetry, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote about trees, flowers and clouds while J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) painted dramatic and richly colored landscapes. In all cases, the natural world played host to intense emotions and new ideas, acting as a place of refuge from the bustle of industry and mechanization. It is clear that nature was not only the object of admiration and wonder for the Romantics but the experience of the natural world was akin to spiritualism. Romanticism enacted a fundamental unity between humans and nature. 

In science, Romanticists found that the prevailing position of the Enlightenment reduced nature to a mechanism; othering the natural world and trying to control it. Romanticism felt that empathy for nature — an understanding of its complex living processes — was an intrinsic human quality; that a oneness with nature was the essential human state. For German Romantic biologists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature represented a crucial interface between subjective and objective realms; a dialectical synthesis between the sensory and the material. In this profound way, nature was central to the project of Romanticism.

In 1762, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Emile, or On Education. The fundamental position of this work is that human nature is inherently good, but that modern society has a corrupting effect. Rousseau writes,

Emile

We pity the sufferings of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are of our own making. (1762 [2013])

Rousseau sets out to develop a method by which the child retains this essential goodness, including, notably, the emphasis on breastfeeding to cultivate intimacy and connection. But what arises as a central argument is the importance of children in elucidating human nature. Children are emotional, they are joyful, they play, they understand nature and, perhaps most crucially, they know no rules. For the Romanticists, this was the ideal state of being. This freedom from structure and tradition was what Romanticism strove for. The figure of a child features heavily in Romanticist art as a symbol of innocence, autonomy, rebellion, unbounded imagination, and connection to nature. This approach to childhood is still alive today in alternative education systems, such as the Steiner Waldorf approach which prioritizes individuality, nature, and self-expression.

The Romantic hero is an archetype we are likely familiar with. Many pieces of Romantic fiction feature a tortured, misunderstood, marginalized character whose many virtues are lost on an oppressive and rule-bound society. 

Examples of this characterization can be found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The “creature” that Victor Frankenstein builds is sensitive and intelligent, but tragically misunderstood due to his monstrous appearance. This treatment eventually turns him into the monster others perceive him to be. Victor, seeing this, is overwhelmed with guilt and both characters end up exiled from society at different times in the novel. Although both Victor and his creation are parallel tragic figures, Victor particularly illustrates the Romantic hero archetype. Victor starts out as a curious child with a propensity for the sciences, but his hunger to play God, paired with his use of modern technologies, corrupts him. This much is evident in his dying words, where he warns others not to make the same mistake:

Frankenstein

 Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition [...]. (Shelley, 1818, [2013]).

Another comparable example might be found in Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), or in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Resurrecting the dark imagination of Gothicism and exploring characters of a disorderly but well-meaning nature, these examples exhibit key characteristics of Romantic fiction. (For more information, you can explore our guide on the Gothic.) 

Romanticist figures themselves are often considered Romantic heroes. Poet Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), for example, had a significant influence on Romanticism. Chatterton was precocious, radical and deeply intelligent, producing work considering politics and the virtues of medievalism. Chatterton and his work were misunderstood, and he sadly ended his own life at the age of 17. The way that Chatterton suffered for his passions makes him an early example of a real-life Romantic hero. Lord Byron, as a further example, has become associated with the Romantic hero both through his semi-autobiographical literary works — significantly Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) — and in his own life. Brooding, melancholic, brave, rebellious, and susceptible to deep affectivity, Byron fought the Ottoman Empire for Greek independence and participated in scandalous affairs, before dying at the age of 36. Byron and the characters he wrote embodied the characteristics of the Romantic hero in such a distinct way that a subcategory dubbed the “Byronic hero” was developed. These examples illustrate how the Romantic hero is an archetype that extends beyond the world of fiction.

Furthermore, the Romantic hero is still an archetype we ascribe to figures today. Artists like Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse provide examples of the Romantic hero in popular culture. These figures represent an independence from convention — they are radical, self-made, ambitious, and fallible, usually meeting an unjust and untimely fate. In this way, we can observe the incredible impact that facets of Romanticism have had on our understanding of the world.

One experience that features heavily in works of Romanticism is the sublime. The sublime refers to the moment that the world becomes incomprehensible in its greatness; where our ability to make sense and organize our experiences betrays us. Our senses become overwhelmed, and rationality is overridden. Often associated with the natural world, the Romanticists saw the sublime as a crucial experience that represented the rawness of emotion and the awe-inspiring greatness of nature.

The power of the sublime was also observable in the rebellious politics of Romanticism. As Phillip Shaw outlines in The Sublime,  

A revolution, for instance, may be sublime insofar as it carries a people along with it, inspiring them with grand ideals, convincing them that the world can begin anew. To some, the imagining of apocalypse is sublime. (2017)

Any experience that leaves us feeling small and insignificant against the forces of the world could be loosely categorized as sublime. In Romanticism, this takes the form of great nautical paintings where waves tower over tiny ships, or poetry that animates the natural world into monstrous forms that are both great and terrifying. In “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (Lyrical Ballads, 1798 [2013]), Wordsworth describes the effect of this sensation, writing,

Lyrical Ballads

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, 

In which the heavy and the weary weight 

These sublime experiences were akin to spirituality for the Romanticists. While Romanticism rejected traditional religious institutions, it still sought experiences beyond the material world that dwarf human rationality. This true Romantic spiritual experience often took place in nature. (For a more in-depth exploration of the sublime, you can see our study guide). 

Imagination played an important role in the Romanticist understanding of the world — as both an expression of the individual self and the indication of an important transcendent connection. Coleridge did extensive theoretical work on the imaginative faculty, breaking it down into two parts as he explains here in Biographia Literaria:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate. (1817, [2018])

For Coleridge, the primary imagination is the fundamental function of the mind. It connects us to nature and allows the natural world to come alive to us. Secondary imagination is a more honed, highly generative version of the primary imagination, and reserved for the artist or poet. It is the conscious application of imagination in the arts, and can suggest connection to or inspiration from a transcendent power. In this way, Romantic imagination was seen as being crucial in shaping the individual, the individual’s connection to the world, the creative impulse, and spiritualism.

Romanticism is not limited to these themes. This list might go on to include spirituality, mythology, empathy, spontaneity, anarchy, motherhood, and more; Romanticism’s prolific activity lends itself to a diverse set of ideas. The cultural movement is unified, however, against what it perceives as the tyranny of aristocracy, tradition, institution, rationalism and materialism, instead championing freedom, and emotion.

 Romanticism was not always received with admiration. As Wu outlines,

When Lyrical Ballads first appeared in 1798 the word ‘Romantic’ was no compliment. It meant ‘fanciful’, ‘light’, even ‘inconsequential’. Wordsworth and Coleridge would have resisted its application; twenty years later, the new generation of writers would recognize it only as the counter in a debate conducted among European intellectuals, barely relevant to what they were doing. And that, after all, is the nature of theoretical discourse: even when conducted by practitioners, it may not bear greatly on the creative process. (2012)

In direct opposition to the virtues of classicism that prioritized precision, symmetry control and simplicity, Romanticism seemed to some frivolous, immature, and ill-conceived. This was a major aesthetic debate of the time. One of Romanticism’s foundational positions was to destabilize the authority of classicism, an authority the Romantics felt was antithetical to artistic expression. Supporters of classicism claimed that Romanticism's heady abandonment of the classical past was irresponsible, and that its preoccupation with subjectivity came laden with threats of solipsism.

With this in mind, Romanticism, in many ways, represents an extreme reaction to the cultural changes of the Enlightenment, and many critics agree Romanticism could have benefited from tempering with some more orderly or collective cultural characteristics. However, Romanticism's impact was so significant because it encouraged a departure from these artistic standards — a movement that was a match for the revolutionary societal and intellectual changes taking place at the time.

The spirit of Romanticism has remained alive. In Romantic Moderns (2014), for example, Alexandra Harris identifies a neo-Romantic movement in British modernist studies, noting a return to introspection, the pastoral, and nature. Harris surmises this modernist revival of Romanticism as a “going home”, writing,

Romantic Moderns

Artists who had previously felt compelled to disguise themselves as avant-garde Frenchmen were now to be found on English beaches sheltering their watercolours from the drizzle. Anthologists (John Betjeman, Geoffrey Grigson, Herbert Read) collected up the verse of eighteenth-century parsons or packed vivid fragments of Romanticism into the tight compass of a paperback, while tourists paused in lay-bys to consult some of the newly written guidebooks. There were church murals, village plays, campaigns to save historic buildings. (2014)

This provides an example of the ways that Romanticism remains an exceedingly useful and relevant framework through which to view new cultural works. The emphasis on the pre-industrial way of life, artistic freedom, emotional expression, and the importance of nature are of perennial importance in the art world. With the ever-growing problems of climate change, too, our relationship with nature has never been more relevant. Even today, Romanticism continues to provoke questions about the function and responsibility of the cultural arts. 

Political Romanticism (2017) by Carl Schmitt

Romanticism and Gender (2013) by Anne K. Mellor

The Romantic Period (2015) by Robin Jarvis

​​Myths of Love: Echoes of Greek and Roman Mythology in the Modern Romantic Imagination (2014) by Ruth Westheimer and Jerome E. Singerman

Complete Works of William Blake (2021) by William Blake

Coleridge, S. T. (2018) Biographia Literaria. Jazzybee Verlag. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1068743/biographia-literaria-pdf

Harris, A. (2014) Romantic Moderns. Thames and Hudson Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1594674/romantic-moderns-english-writers-artists-and-the-imagination-from-virginia-woolf-to-john-piper-pdf

Keats, J. (2014) Selected Poems and Letters. HarperCollins Publishers. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/671442/selected-poems-and-letters-pdf 

Rousseau, J.-J. (2013) Emile. Dover Publications. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/112595/emile-pdf

Shaw, P. (2017) The Sublime. 2nd edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1561938/the-sublime-pdf

Shelley, M. (2013) Frankenstein. Dover Publications. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/113049/frankenstein-pdf

Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S. T. (2013) Lyrical Ballads. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1607344/lyrical-ballads-pdf 

Wu, D. (2012) Romanticism. 4th edn. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1014765/romanticism-an-anthology-pdf

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What is Cubism? | Cubist Art Definitions, Examples & Analysis | Perlego

Cubism was a modern art movement that emerged in France in the first decade of the 20th century, often heralded as one of the most important moments in art history. Among its most significant influences were the works of Paul Cézanne and the aesthetic of African art, although Cubism is most renowned for its innovation, its intrepid journey into new artistic territories. A foundational avant-garde art movement, Cubism signified a change in the style and potential of Western painting.  Before the avant-garde, artists had largely been striving towards accurate and naturalist representations of their subjects. Cubism marked an early example of a stylistically recognizable departure from representational art, led by Georges Braque and, most famously, Pablo Picasso. 

In Cubism, Guillaume Apollinaire and Dorothea Eimert explain how, between 1909 and 1912, Braque and Picasso: 

Cubism

“separated their art from everything real without turning completely to abstraction,” (2014). Mostly painting figures and still lifes, the Cubists, Appollinaire and Eimert assert, “layered views from many angles in order to capture the subject from all sides. They analysed the object and brought it to the canvas as a fragmented picture.” (2014)

This style can be observed in Picasso’s famous paintings of angular figures and disjointed objects.

The name “Cubism” came from a derogatory exhibition review written in 1908 that accused Braque of “reducing everything […] to cubes” (Vauxcelles, 1908). Although it was not supposed to flatter the artist, Braque and Picasso reappropriated the term to describe their art.

The Cubist movement is often understood in two parts. The period from 1909–1912 is referred to as “analytic Cubism,” which saw objects and figures deconstructed and reconstructed from new perspectives. Before Cubism, Western painting showed figures and objects as they appear to the eye: from a single perspective. Early Cubism was not an expression of pure abstraction — it still depicted figures and objects — but it represented them in such a way that multiple perspectives were shown at once. This resulted in a style that was fragmented and geometric; at once recognizable and strange. From 1912 onward, Cubism would become more abstract. Characterized as “synthetic Cubism,” this new development in the movement welcomed more varied materials and techniques, incorporating bright colors, simpler shapes, and raw materials into the canvas. Cubism sought to change the relationship of art to the world, emphasizing the two dimensionality of the canvas and the limitations of linear perspective. It is often considered the precursor to many avant-garde art movements that followed such as Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and Art Deco.

Braque was heavily influenced by French artist Paul Cézanne and his unique renderings of the natural world at the end of the 19th century. Jane Bingham asserts that Cézanne’s “work provided a bridge between the relatively short-lived Impressionist movement and the emergence of later styles” (2019). The use of unnatural cylindrical and geometric shapes to represent scenes in nature was a break in the tradition of form and representation. This break in tradition was something the Cubists continued to perpetuate. Most significantly, Cubism can be understood as a response to Cézanne’s famous proposal that “you must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” (1904, [1976]). He suggested that all the various forms of the natural world could be reduced to geometrical shapes, what Appolinaire and Eirmert describe as “the artist’s response to the changed preconditions of science regarding space and time” (2014). The avant-garde was largely a response to the rise of materialism and rational thinking associated with modernity. With the arrival of new modes of transportation and the accelerated spread of information, time and space in modernity was condensed, made more malleable. Modern mechanization made such advancements possible, and so informed a new way of looking at the world, including the world of nature. This change in the treatment of the natural world was something the Cubists explored in their figurative and still life paintings based on the earlier works of Cézanne . 

Picasso was equally inspired by African and Indigenous art . He observed the way that the African masks at the ethnographic museum in Paris were both representative of a face and highly angular and exaggerated. These mask faces became a recognizable feature of Cubism. Faces in Cubist paintings have exaggerated features, high contrasts between light and dark and layered and disorienting perspective, features which Picasso encountered in those Tribal masks.

Picasso’s observations in the ethnographic museum precipitated an obsession with collecting objects. In Picasso, Patrick O’Brian describes how the artist’s, 

Picasso: A Biography

flat was piled high with things like guitars; mandolins; boxes; chests; popular and colored prints in frames of plaited straw; countless African and Oceanic figures. (2012)

These collected objects were to act as inspiration for Picasso’s paintings and sculptures. 

Cubists also emulated the way African and Oceanic sculpture played with perspective and dimension. They were at once abstract and figurative, elongating or contracting limbs and torsos, shrinking or exaggerating heads. Where the Cubists emphasized the two-dimensional nature of canvas, Tribal sculpture often gave its figures a two-dimensional appearance, compressing perspective into one field of vision.

This ancient artistic inspiration offered the avant-garde an escape from the cultural standards of classical Western sculpture. Western art, from classicism to the renaissance, favored smooth, soft, and precise representation. The avant-garde hoped to challenge the standards that this art set, Cubism partly doing so through the appropriation of African and Oceanic artistic figuration. Not only did African and Oceanic art explore dimension and perspective, but it also incorporated a series of natural materials like wood, metals, and ivory. Synthetic Cubists also sought to use raw materials in their artistic works. Through this appropriation, Cubism challenged the dominant Western aesthetic and ushered in a new function of Western art, one not based around pleasing traditional and elite artistic tastes but rather exploring beyond what the eye can see from a single limited perspective.

Picasso is one of the most famous avant-garde artists, and his works are certainly amongst the most recognizable of the Cubist movement. His painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is often referred to as the “first Cubist picture” and is exemplary of what became the aesthetic of Cubism (Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 2019).

It shows five naked women whose angular bodies crowd an exaggeratedly two-dimensional space. In comparison to the nude motif of classical painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon proved striking in its disregard of the soft shapes and colors that previously constituted aesthetic beauty. The faces of the women are thought to resemble the African masks that Picasso was so inspired by. Exaggerated features and colors as well as the angular and multi-dimensional aspects of the women’s faces challenged the naturalist beauty standards of Western art.

Guernica (1937) is another of Picasso’s most famous works. The huge canvas shows a greyscale scene of violence in response to the German bombing of the Basque town that the painting was named after. Picasso was not particularly political, atypical for an avant-garde artist at the time, but Guernica was certainly an anti-war symbol, condemning the violence of the Nazis and bringing attention to the horrors of the Spanish civil war. Guernica shows the power that Cubism’s strange shapes, angles, and semi-abstract forms had to horrify, move, and inform viewers.

In the early (analytic) stages of Cubism, Braque tended to paint more abstract-leaning works than Picasso. Man with a Guitar (1911–1912) is one such example. If it weren’t for the descriptive title, what the painting depicts would not be easily decipherable. Man with a Guitar shows fragments and suggestions of vaguely human and instrument features amongst cylindrical and spherical shapes. The lines that fragment and slice the brown-grey shapes come together to create the outline of the man and his guitar. In typical Cubist fashion, Braque subverted the illusion of perspective that painting had previously depicted, instead oscillating between unnatural angular depth and two-dimensional space.

These works that partly constitute the Cubist canon exemplify the way that the movement revolutionized the art world. With the unconventional influence of what was considered “primitive” art, the denaturalization of objects and figures, and the reinstatement of two-dimensional canvas space, Cubism challenged the standards and purpose of Western art.

Cubism evolved to use many different mediums to produce art of varying degrees of abstraction, influencing not only the trajectory of the avant-garde but of art in general. Cubism’s later incorporation of everyday materials is often thought to have inspired the Dadaist readymades while elements of the Cubist tendency to denaturalize objects can be observed in Surrealism. As Willard Bohn asserts in The Early Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, Cubism’s aesthetic approach was so radical that it “exerted a disproportional influence on modern art” (2018).

Not only did Cubism set the scene for the incredibly influential movements of the avant-garde that proceeded, but it is widely accepted to have changed the way that works of art interact with their subjects and to have confronted the limiting expectations of aesthetic beauty. This aesthetic revolution was one that subverted the naturalism and objectivity of previously existing art and challenged the eye of the viewer to observe distorted and fragmented images from a seemingly illogical and manifold point of view.

R. Bruce Elder describes this new artistic order in Cubism and Futurism, asserting that,

Cubism and Futurism

Cubism understands the new art not as imitating the appearance of reality, but rather as oﬀering a homology between the way the painting comes to be (that is, the transformation of reality into art) and the process by which perception is formed and an object emerges in awareness. The homology between these processes suggests the collusion of the senses and the imagination. (2018)

The conceptual approach to art that Cubism helped initiate created a new visual language imbued with tension and metaphor, heralding a new function of art in society and the world.

Picasso: Selected Essays by Leo Steinberg and Sheila Schwartz.

The Picasso's Cubism by Gabriel Baldovin.

Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams by Bram Dijkstra.

The Age of the Avant-Garde by Hilton Kramer.

Bingham, Jane. (2019) Paul Cézanne. Arcturus Publishing. 

Cézanne, Paul. (1976). Letters, ed. John Rewald. 4th ed. New York.

Vauxcelles, Louis. (1908) Exposition Braques. Gil Blas.

Elder, Bruce. (2018) Cubism and Futurism. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Apollinaire, Guillaume, and Dorothea Eimert. (2014) Cubism. Parkstone International.

Danchev, Alex. (2007) Georges Braque: A Life. Penguin Books Limited

O’Brian, Patrick. (2012) Picasso. Harper Collins Publishers.

Barr, Alfred. (2019) Cubism and Abstract Art. Taylor and Francis.

Bohn, Willard. (2018) The Early Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art. Taylor and Francis.

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The Male Gaze | Defining Laura Mulvey's Theory of Visual Pleasure

Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’ has come to play a significant role in critical understandings of the function of cinema. The term ‘male gaze’ first appeared in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) but was popularized by Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), reprinted in Feminism and Film Theory (2013). Since then, the term ‘male gaze’ has expanded beyond the realm of academia and made its way into popular discourse. In Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times, Mulvey later acknowledges the dissemination of this idea, reflecting, 